If you get summoned to jury duty in Manhattan, the only reasonable way to handle it is a simple, two-step process:

1) When you get the notification in the mail, you get the option to postpone your jury duty for up to six months. Call the number and postpone your jury duty for the full six months.

2) Move. You have six months to settle on a new place to live, get your life together, pack your stuff, and say goodbye to your loved ones in the area. Maybe you need to find a new job or even a new career, and that’s not easy. But do try to take time to enjoy New York City while you can. It’s an incredible place to live, but the city just pulled your card, and you should not live here anymore.

I don’t know the legality of this maneuver, though I suspect moving away is an acceptable reason to get out of your jury service without penalty. If it isn’t, you might have to flee the country.

At times in my jury-duty saga that began Jan. 11 and ended on Friday, I tweeted my frustration with the process and earned, in response, public shamings from people eager to remind me of civilians’ important role in our legal process. Here’s one rule they should implement to improve jury duty: Everyone who criticizes people complaining about jury duty should themselves be immediately conscripted into jury duty. It’s only fair.

Anyway, I never said that I disagree with people having the right to juries of their peers, and I do not believe myself in any way above my civic responsibilities. I showed up, after all. But I think it should also be my right as a member of free society to complain about this responsibility, because — in my case, at least — it totally sucked.

Jury duty, as depicted in the HBO original series Sex and the City. (Craig Blankenhorn/HBO)

The entire process could easily be overhauled and vastly improved with a pretty straightforward website. I have no idea what byzantine legal undertakings would be necessary to accomplish such a thing, and I suspect that no one bothers reforming the jury-duty system because by the time anyone’s done with it, they’ve got six years before they need to worry about it again. And I understand that people do sometimes get assigned to interesting and meaningful cases, and I suspect I myself would take seriously the privilege of deciding someone’s fate in any sort of criminal trial.

But mine was a civil case, and one that looked to me from the start like more of a lawyer event than anything else. I don’t think I’m supposed to divulge any details, but as soon as both sides presented a few details of the trial and their lists of witnesses, I got suspicious that I was watching a racket of sorts on both sides — a bunch of dudes in suits getting paid by the hour to skim resources off the system and inconvenience people.

Obviously I don’t think all lawyers are like that. I know many good and decent people who happen to be lawyers, and none of them seem like they’re like that. I’m just saying it felt to me like these lawyers were like that. It all felt rote, and like the people driving and benefiting from the operation were neither the proper plaintiffs nor defendants but the cottage industry that clearly existed around this particular type of lawsuit.

That was Day 1, and nothing that happened on Days 2-4 changed my mind.

My service started with reporting to a big room in the courthouse, watching an orientation video, and filling out a questionnaire with some basic questions about myself and my background. That part only took a few hours, so whatever. After a while, they read my name in a list of 60 prospective jurors assigned to a case and instructed us to go to one of the courtroom. That’s where the lawyers introduced themselves and some very general details of the case, and asked us to tell them if we personally knew any of the lawyers or witnesses. I didn’t, so I was told to return a week later.

Here’s where it got annoying: When I came back the next week, the lawyers used a bingo machine of sorts to pull out the names of 24 of the 60 people, then began asking them a bunch of questions to determine whether they could be unbiased participants in a jury. They did it in town-hall format, and asked the rest of us to listen so we could be prepared to answer the same questions when we were put on the panel. Fine; I understood this to be part of the process.

Only the first group of 24 people answered lawyers’ questions for three full days. The questions were incredibly repetitive and laboriously presented, and many of them seemed to ask potential jurors for expert-level understanding of topics on which they clearly weren’t experts. It looked pretty boring for most of the empanelled, and for the 36 of us just sitting there for three days listening to strangers answer the same questions over and over again, it was mind-numbingly dull. At one point they seriously asked if anyone “had ever had an emotional experience that shaped their worldview.” Who says no to that?

In the afternoon of Day 4, they sent about half the 24 people home. By this point, the rest of us had a pretty clear idea which of them didn’t want to wind up on the jury — most of them, naturally — and the transparent joy on their faces when they were relieved of duty made for one of the few highlights of the entire process. There was one guy I nicknamed Beardy McWokescarf that I found particularly annoying. He kept going on and on about his personal moral code and all his hangups about the case. But when I saw the smile on Beardy McWokescarf’s face when he was told he could leave, I understood. Like me, Beardy McWokescarf was not here to make friends. I could only tip my cap to him as he strutted out of the room with a million-dollar grin. Game recognize game.

Oh, also: They gave us lots of breaks, and practically every time we got a break, we would return to the courtroom only for all the lawyers to immediately get up and disappear for a half hour or longer. We could have been on break this whole time! If it happened once or twice, I would’ve figured that something just came up and couldn’t wait and they had to go deal with it. But it happened, honestly, after like 80% of the breaks. Various lawyers kept apologizing for how slow the process was going, but it appeared clear from their behavior that they had no respect for our time whatsoever.

A courtroom scene from ABC’s The Practice. (Vivian Zink/ABC)

After part of the original panel was dismissed on Day 4, the lawyers filled their seats with more names pulled from the bingo-wheel thing — mine included. But now, instead of asking questions to the group, they started going through every question with every prospective juror individually while everyone else sat there.

Why couldn’t this just be done by appointment, seriously? Outside of one guy who had a lot to say, no prospective juror could have possibly spent more than about 10 total minutes talking. By this point, we’ve already heard all the questions and a bunch of possible answers, and no one but the person being questioned has an opportunity to weigh in on them. So why are the rest of us just hanging around, reading magazines and fumbling with our phones? Even if you don’t want to have to fully explain every question to every individual person, why not do this, like, 10 people at a time in three-hour increments?

It wasn’t until Day 5 that I said so much as a word, and by that point I knew that it was pretty obvious when people were lying or exaggerating in an effort to get sent home and that doing so wasn’t necessarily effective. Plus, you’re under oath, and I value honesty in general. So I figured my best bet would be to keep it real.

I used the term “shakedown” when asked my feelings on the case and expressed my skepticism about some of the lawyers involved. At one point, I confessed that the pace of the jury-selection process made me suspect that, if I wound up on the actual jury, I would just go along with whatever everyone else said to make it end faster. I admitted — and I admit — that this is a bad way to be and bad for justice, but, like I said, I was keeping it real. They asked me to be honest, so I was honest.

After lunch on Day 6, I got called into the judge’s chambers to discuss some of the concerns I expressed about the case. The judge pointed me to a chair in the middle of the room, where I sat answering questions while all eight lawyers stood around me in a semi-circle like I was being inducted into the world’s most boring chapter of Freemasons. I reiterated my skepticism to the judge and explained that I do not believe anyone capable of fully divorcing himself from preconceived notions, but the judge assuaged my concerns and got me to promise to do my best to act on only the evidence presented in court.

Then, in what was basically a throwaway comment at the end of the meeting, the judge said something that was either a straight-up lie or an intentional misrepresentation of the truth. Again, I don’t want to give specifics. It wasn’t a huge lie, but it was one nonetheless told to further quash my doubts, and it was extremely easy to verify the truth in a way that didn’t technically amount to researching the lawsuit.

I got super steamed about this when I got home, and showed up still hot on Day 7 and asked to speak to the judge. A second round of potential jurors were sent home early on Day 7, but I was not among them, so I sat and listened to the final panelists go through the same series of questions as rage brewed inside of me. A lawyer said I would be able to speak to the judge after lunch, but before I could, they announced that they had selected the jury and would list the names of the last group of people getting sent home.

I decided then that I would ask to speak to the judge one way or the other. I felt wronged, and I did not want to sit by and allow a representative of the court to blur the truth to me after I had only been honest with them. And I fantasized about making a whole big show of it, demonstrating how I caught the judge in the lie, and then maybe, when the judge said, “I hold you in contempt of court,” I’d say, “I hold this court in contempt of me!”

Only mine was the final name called on the list of people who could go home, and by that point I was feverishly counting the people still there and anxiously calculating the increasing odds that I would wind up stuck in jury duty listening to legal tedium for another month. The relief that washed over me when I heard my name called convinced me that I should not spend so much as one minute more than necessary inside the courthouse, so I collected my stuff, picked up the form saying I fulfilled my obligation, and skedaddled.

I biked home weaving through Manhattan’s busy streets and considering its endless possibilities, staring up the avenues past miles and miles of magnificent skyscrapers tapering to a vanishing point where an explosion of colors breathed out from the late afternoon sky, thinking about how glorious it felt to be so suddenly unburdened, how lucky I am to live here, and how sad it will be to leave in six years when I get called for jury duty again.

Also: If you do wind up spending more time than you’d like in the courthouse, definitely make the most of your lunch breaks. Lots of great Chinese and Vietnamese food down there. The Infatuation has a good list of jury-duty lunch suggestions, and I’ll ad that the roast pork and noodles at Fung Wah No. 1 Fast Food on Chrystie Street is probably the best $4 lunch I’ve had in this city.

I found this on FTW and wanted to share:
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